


Liberty Avenue

by Frayach



Category: Queer as Folk (US)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Goodbyes, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-05
Updated: 2014-06-05
Packaged: 2018-02-03 11:56:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1743848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frayach/pseuds/Frayach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brian says good-bye to Justin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Liberty Avenue

When more than one square mile of a city is terrifying, and the lidless jars in your mind fill with the sludge of bad memories if you look in the direction of your childhood, is it any wonder you stay close to home?

Brian watched Justin join the line of ticketed passengers waiting for the institutional grope of security apparatuses. He turned to wave like the recently dead who’ve passed into the world of the unliving, already free, already gone. Brian doesn't wave back. He’d imagined himself here once. In this same airport. He’d tested the seams of dreams of leaving – and he had. But only as far as Happy Valley. Then he’d returned, and ever since, the spider’s web of the Liberty Avenue district has stretched wider and grown stickier. The more homosexuality became visible, the deeper into the darkness he’d slipped. The darkness of stasis, of remaining the same. Of needing to rule – not for the sake of the kingdom he’d inherited but for the sake of his sanity.

He would not go to New York City. Although he knew their names – Houston and Bleeker Streets, 14th, Broadway, A, B and C – he had never walked them, and it was too late now. He’d given away his map, or perhaps he’d lost it. He didn’t know. All he knew was that he’d had one and mislaid it. Just because Justin was leaving didn’t mean he’d find it. The momentous so rarely changes the habits and circumstances of daily life.

The irony of the name – Liberty Avenue – wasn’t lost on him. Beyond the borders breached briefly by orgasm, there was a no man’s land of imagined lifestyles that repulsed him. Children. Houses with yards. Barbeque grills on weather-proofed decks. Practical cars and shelved desires. He was never going there. No matter how much he’d lost – and all that he had still left to lose – he would not leave the wet alleys with their gardens of used condoms and cigarette butts. The battle-scarred landscape of his youth.

It wasn’t about bitterness. He’d merely learned to let go. Life had schooled him well in the physics of distance, if not corporeal than existential. With Justin it would be both. How does one win against the force of a new freedom hewn from a comfortable childhood and the security of recognized hardship? No one in New York had heard the resounding _crack_ when wood had breached skull. Being freed of the collective memory of his bashing was going to be the splint to the bones fear-cocooned loathing had broken that night in the parking garage . . . that night Brian couldn’t forget but hoped fervently that Justin could. 

Staying wasn’t an option. Not even words choked past a gun barrel could free Justin of the violence of an eclipsed memory. Only leaving held that power. Brian knew this. Even though he, himself, had never escaped the belt, the clothes hanger, the electrical cord, he knew that if he had, things would be different. Or might be. Possibilities are better than foregone conclusions. Justin deserved more than forgone conclusions.

Later that night he’d write the first email, the first corrosive drip of good-bye. Nothing shocking, nothing that’d bring Justin back on the first plane to Pittsburgh. Something fond like a remembered moment, already sepia-tinted with letting go. Something soothing. A kiss to the forehead before the eyes drift shut.

How long would it take? It was the brink of spring. Coups usually happen in the Fall. That’s the season we’ve been trained to let go of summer’s indolence and resubmit ourselves to the yoke of expectation – of incremental steps forward. Fifth grade, seventh, ninth, twelfth. Staying back was a euphemism for failure. Keep moving, we were told. Don’t stop. Don’t look back. The spinal-fluid of childhood is infused with forward momentum. The delusion of forever might survive summer, but it would not survive October.

Such a brief time. So little time to say everything that needed to be said.

Brian watched as the metal detector swallowed the man he loved too late. It was like a portal to a kind of Narnia, a closet of moth-ball smelling furs and out-of-fashion suits. If you could wish a child out of childhood, would you do it? You know what waits on the other side of the door. Adulthood with its voracious regrets. Would you wish that on the young?

Or more accurately, would you grant the young their wishes of forever when they haven’t even emerged yet, crinkle-winged from their cocoons? Justin wanted to be married. He was like a student-soldier climbing out of the trenches in Somme. Brian should’ve been strong enough to protect Justin from what he wanted . . . but he wasn’t. He’d already dropped to his knees and bent his head a long time ago, submitting to the blade. He’d meant it when he’d said he’d give Justin anything he desired. He’d been one of the dead reaching out through the veil to the living. Nonetheless, Justin had found the strength to resist, the strength to survive. The strength to leave.

Brian would not stop him.

In the parking lot, Brian watched the planes take flight well past Justin’s departure time. Each one carried brave people – it doesn’t matter whether they’re flying away or flying home, both require courage. Brian has done neither.

Liberty Avenue will still be there when he returns. The smudge of neon on the wet streets will be the same. The creeping fixation of desire will be the same. The tang of anticipation and the stale smell of habit will be the same. His addiction will be sated for as long as it takes to lose his erection after coming, and his hunt for the next fix will began seconds later at the first chemical whiff of grief.

Sometimes, late at night, he’ll berate himself for letting himself be let go. He’ll wish he remembered his selfishness. He’ll picture Justin at a party, happy even though Brian isn’t there. He’ll imagine the fug of wet garbage in an alleyway and the thrill of having a place to go – some place like home, some place that evolves into home so slowly that you only know it’s home when someone asks you where you’re from, and you don’t say Pittsburgh. Brian will stand at the window naked, smoking a joint, and wonder if that sound he imagines is footsteps on the stairs. He’ll let it be, but only for a moment. He’ll know what it’s like when there’s no accompanying knock on the door.

He’s pretty sure he knows how this goes – it’s a time-honored theme. The young fly away, and the old remain. His laugh is ugly when he flicks his cigarette out the window; it’s been burnt down to the filter and all that remains is the taste of melting plastic. When did he take his seat among the audience of the old? When did he stop doing and start watching? Was it the day he finally acknowledged the responsibility of taking a much younger lover? If it was . . . well then, perhaps he’d turn back the clock and take a seasoned trick to bed that night, not a virgin whose response to having KY squirted on his asshole was “it’s cold.” Because what do you say in response except “it’ll heat up”? It’s those kinds of things that use up the air in your lungs and make you need the air that he breathes to be yours too.

Brian turns the key in the ignition, and the car purrs to life. There’s only one place to go and that’s home. And maybe that’s what home is – the only place you can go when you can’t go anywhere else. He fights against the wish that Justin is imagining him. He closes his eyes and pictures the interiors of airplanes, their unforgiving pre-flight light, the circulation of used-up air, the ping of the captain’s instructions. You’re crammed in like sardines in a can, and there’s no space left over for second thoughts. Justin is not remembering their awkward “see you soon”s; he’s wondering what the cab fare will be from LaGuardia to Alphabet City. He won’t be thinking of Brian, at least not for a while. 

Pittsburgh straddles the border between coal mines and corn fields. It’s the thread that sutures together the East and the Midwest. It’s the invisible line between “soda” and “pop.” It’s the first step toward the avenues of Oz. It’s a place that exists merely so that the other places can forget it. He cannot recall when his name and the name of his city fused into one, but it had. They’re the places one says good-bye to and returns to only reluctantly.

Brian will not be the consolation prize for failure. He’d been so when Justin returned from L.A. He didn’t want to wake to Justin’s turned back as he sits on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands, wondering how on earth it’d all ended up like this. He could survive Justin’s leaving, but he couldn’t survive Justin’s return. He couldn’t be the only thing that made Pittsburgh bearable. It was too heavy a burden to bear.

Brian waits until Justin’s plane lands before he turns toward the glint of windows in the afternoon sun. He has no one he can call, no one’s place he can crash at until he stops choking on solitude. This is that moment. That moment that defines a person. He wishes he could believe he’ll be okay, but he doesn’t know. He’s never really tested himself. There’s been no rehearsal before the show. He might forget his lines. He might . . .

It’s noon, but Liberty Avenue is only just awaking from its Friday night stupor. Brian pulls his car into the parking lot of the nearest baths. It’s always night in a place that has no windows. The first free glory hole he finds, he presses his naked body against the plywood wall and waits for a mouth to suck his cock. There’s no more perfect invention. No more perfect fusing of needs. It takes longer than usual, but eventually he comes.


End file.
